If only climate modelers had warned us that children would know what Frozen Fish Tanks were?
Instead Texas spent most of the last decade and billions of dollars trying to cool the world by changing its electricity grid.
Thanks to market-distorting policies that favor and subsidize wind and solar energy, Texas has added more than 20,000 megawatts (MW) of those intermittent resources since 2015 while barely adding any natural gas and retiring significant coal generation. — Jason Issac
Indeed Texas has the fifth largest windpower fleet in the world — bigger than everyone except China, the USA, Germany and India. But having that industrial fleet of free clean energy didn’t save Texas this week. What happened appears to have been a systemic wide failure on so many levels. But one of those levels surely, is the failure to winterize the grid. There are plenty of gas and wind plants in colder places like Canada and they run through winter just fine.
But the awful truth is, that it costs more to add these “heat and de-icing” features and with everyone planning for Global Warming, well, who needs ’em? It’s almost like ERCOT in Texas assumed the weather would never get that cold again. Like perhaps they were afraid of endless droughts, more cyclones, and deadly heatwaves, but not Arctic ice storms?
Renewables fans will point to this as mere incompetence. But if the government had built the “fifth largest nation” of windmills with all the cold bells and whistles, it would make them even more unaffordable. Anyone with infinite money can make wind plants more useful in cold weather, but it makes them more expensive all year.
Texas: What Went Wrong
Ray Ryan, War Room Media
… this is Texas . . . so the need for winterizing assets has always been an afterthought. Other parts of the country that deal with colder temps annually have solutions for a lot of these issues. For example, natural gas power generation can have heat tracers on pipes, valves, and various connections; insulation around key equipment; indoor power generation vs. open to the elements. Insulation would be near impossible to implement in Texas due to the heat, but the other components could be installed as a retrofit or at the time of construction. The only problem is, it costs money. Wind turbines can be outfitted with insulated turbines, oil and fluid heaters, resin covered blades to limit ice buildup, and other high-grade components to protect the asset . . . but again, it costs money. Wind also decreases in the winter months due to the physics of how wind is created, so ERCOT already had a massive range of expected wind output: 12%–43%, and in really bad weather 6%–7%. Many of Texas’s wind turbines (except for those along the coast initially) ended up freezing, limiting total output, while solar panels were covered with snow or ice, limiting capacity. Most of the renewables in the country (especially in Texas) are backed up by short-cycle gas turbines, which are assets that can turn on in 2–3 hours. These assets are called peakers, or peak shaving, and can come online quickly to fill a growing electricity need during peak hours or surging demand, such as heat waves or cold spells. Coal can be used as peak shaving, but there are limitations: it is costly and timely to maintain because it can take 24–48 hours to bring it online, coal piles can freeze together if not rotated, etc. All of these restrictions make natural gas the preferred and cost-effective method.
Texas paid for unreliable energy, not for spare capacity
Ryan also makes the point that Texas doesn’t pay people to sit around with ready capacity. (They certainly got what they paid for).
ERCOT is an “energy only” system, which means producers are only compensated for power produced, while a capacity market provides compensation for readiness or spare capacity for power as well.
And Planning Engineer spells out just how this set the grid up for failure:
Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in Texas
By Planning Engineer
Unlike all other US energy markets, Texas does not even have a capacity market. By design they rely solely upon the energy market. This means that entities profit only from the actual energy they sell into the system. They do not see any profit from having stand by capacity ready to help out in emergencies. The energy only market works well under normal conditions to keep prices down.
And he asks the key question, and the answer is “renewables”:
Why has Capacity been devalued?
If you want to achieve a higher level of penetration from renewables, dollars will have to be funneled away from traditional resources towards renewables. For high levels of renewable penetration, you need a system where the consumers’ dollars applied to renewable generators are maximized. Rewarding resources for offering capacity advantages effectively penalizes renewables. As noted by the head of the PUC in Texas, an energy only market can fuel diversification towards intermittent resources.
So the core values of a strong grid were eaten away in the haste to make the grid “renewable friendly”. Those same artificial forces pushed coal plants below profitability — and now having destabilized the grid, when the trainwreck occurs, the Greenblob wants to blame the failure on fossil fuels.
To paraphase Planning Engineer: — why would anyone build a perfectly good power plant to sit around most of the time doing nothing and just waiting for the wind turbines to fail?
More emergency peaking units [gas plants that can be brought on at a moments notice] would be a great thing to have on hand. Why would generators be inclined to do such a thing? Consider, what would be happening if the owners of gas generation had built sufficient generation to get through this emergency with some excess power? Instead of collecting $9,000 per MWH from existing functioning units, they would be receiving less than $100 per MWH for the output of those plants and their new plants. Why would anyone make tremendous infrastructure that would sit idle in normal years and serve to slash your revenue by orders of magnitudes in extreme conditions?
On Monday night that is an awfully sharp fall. That was a sharp loss of 10GW in the dead of night. Did all the gas wells freeze at once, or was there some common safety feature of automatic shut downs triggered? (I’ve seen no suggestion that there was, I just wonder). Perhaps it was the middle of the night when lots of people in Texas suddenly put their gas heater on and took the supply from the power stations?
Texas energy generation
These blackouts wouldn’t have happened if Texas hadn’t shut down so much coal power.
The Green blob is trying to tell us that the ghastly blackouts was all the fault of fossil fuels — mainly because gas powered plants went offline. But the truth is that if Texas hasn’t swapped coal plants for wind towers the grid would have been fine. They certainly couldn’t run a 100% wind and solar grid. But we all know they can run just fine on 100% fossil fuels.
Bills going through the roof
Tyler Durden on ZeroHedge explains how some people are paying for power on variable or indexed plans. So when the grid gets $9,000 price spikes, their bill rockets up obscenely:
Royce Pierce told Newsweek he owes electric company, Griddy, $8,162.73 for his electricity usage this month. He said that’s a massive increase from his usual $387 bill.
“It’s mind-blowing. I honestly didn’t believe the price at first,” Pierce said.
“It’s not a great feeling knowing that there is a looming bill that we just can’t afford.”
Pierce was one of the lucky ones who maintained power through the entire grid crisis, but it came at a steep cost.
“There is nothing we can do now. This is already an insane thing and I don’t care about the money when it comes to people’s health,” Pierce said, adding that if the virus pandemic hadn’t affected his work, “we could have taken care of this.”
Other horror stories of soaring power bills flood local television stations across the Lone Star State. When food and housing insecurities are incredibly high due to pandemic job loss, many folks in Texas who were on variable power plans could be financially devastated.
Texas won’t forget this.
And yet the Green menace still protest that subsidy farms had nothing to do with it , if Ercot did winterise their turbines that would have made them out to be climate change denier’s .
350
At best, and this has just be proven, that renewables of more than 10% grid capacity appear to actually sabotage grid stability and resilience.
Solution – temove renewables back to mo.more than 5% of grid capacity and demolish the rest.
The cold weather also appears to show global warming is a classic intel misdirection effort to maximize deaths when it gets cold…that and cripple your peopke and thier ability to withstand an attack from over your border…coincidence.
This appears to be about crippling the USA to make it vulnerable….aka Tr***n
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’‘Instead Texas spent most of the last decade and billions of dollars trying to cool the world by changing its electricity grid.‘‘
And they succeeded
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Rob if I could I’d give you a gold star for that comment , simply brilliant .
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I hate it when you do too good a job.
120
That is REALLY funny!
60
Well I LOL.
Yet I dispute parts of the post;
“Ryan also makes the point that Texas doesn’t pay people to sit around with ready capacity. (They certainly got what they paid for).
ERCOT is an “energy only” system, which means producers are only compensated for power produced, while a capacity market provides compensation for readiness or spare capacity for power as well.”
Provided or not it is abundantly clear that N.G. not only load follows the grid, but it also follows wind and solar. It clearly ramps up and ramps down to compensate for the daily failures of wind and solar.
https://i.postimg.cc/tTc1tYnV/texas-GAS-saves-the-day.png
Clearly NG increased their production throughout the crisis, and it increases and decreases daily, following hapless wind and solar, paid or not, it does so at the cost of great lost revenue, ( in the absence of useless wind and solar they could operate at high capacity steady production all year. ) So they are staffed 24 7 to vary there load from maximum to minimum several times a day, losing revenue, increasing costs, stressing equipment.
The spare capacity is in the base price of NG. T. Boone Pickens, who said he only built Wind because it was subsidized, also made a fortune on N.G. So while Texas does not “pay people to sit around with ready capacity” the people pay N.G. companies to do exactly that.
( Font the people always pay regardless. The idea that it’s free if the government pays it is false, dangerous and ludicrous.)
And NG would have zero need to do this if Wind and solar were not there. So they must be compensated. But that cost is due to the un-reliables, wind and solar!
Also NG list very little production due to freezing valves. I understand that most production was lost because they had to divert NG generation to simply heating homes due to wind dropping to nothing. ( And that drop would have happened regardless if the freeze as between midnight and 6 am on the most critical day the wind dropped to 2 mph) This diversion to heating was the biggest reduction in NG ability to ramp up. Also one plant at least on the worst day lost generation because the compressors required to move the gas were part of the electric grid that had to be blacked out to prevent full cascade failure. ( Oops that N.G. loss was a wind generation failure as well.) Winterization was a bit player in NG production throughout the crisis where NG prevented the problem from being 10 times worse.
President Donald Trump and Energy Secretary Rick Perry were absolutely correct when they asked the FERC to ensure that our coal-fired and nuclear power plant be kept in service.
80
Royce Pierce has to consume a lot of power when wholesale prices go negative 🙂
40
Replaceable are not commandables. When the wind stops on a boiling hot still night and what’s the chance of that, all the windmills and solar panels and batteries are utterly useless.
Nature is not commandable. It is why windmills were abandoned two centuries ago.
But the coal which saved the forests of Europe and gave us steel and concrete and limitless free natural power is now the enemy of man. Especially the EU and UN. Even though all life is made 98% from three atoms, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. One of them is evil because it is black, like diamond or air.
481
And while the Green Woke movement is destroying history, rewriting history it is also making sure that science is destroyed too. When will organic chemistry, the study of compounds of carbon, be banned?
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Shh!!!
They think ‘Organic Chemistry’ means holistic healthy chemistry.
If we’re careful, they might not find out about the C word part.
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To quote Dr Robert Laughlin, a Nobel prize winner for Physics: “You can’t find much actual global warming in present day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geological time, something that the Earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission, or explaining itself.” ToM
180
ToM
Excellent point.
My Leftist brother in law breathlessly told me about how the rate of warming now was faster than ever seen before. I asked him where he got that from, and he claimed it was from others at Sydney University where he works in an admin capacity. Too bad I told him they could not have accounted for the huge increases as we came out of the Ice Age. The transition from Ice to no Ice took place in a matter of a few decades – that is a truely massive transition and puts any “warming” seen since the end of the Little Ice Age into perspective.
One might ask what drove such enormous increases? It certainly was not CO2…. And maybe such factors are at work today at a much lower level…?
50
Prophet, The “few decades”?
At the height of the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago there was ice over New York central park about 1400 metres deep. That’s a lot of ice.
Over the melt period of 13,000 years duration that ended 7,000 years ago most of the ice melted in what might be seen as an overshoot. Sea levels were up to 7 metres above current at the climax of the melt and have been falling ever since.
10
Nature is not commandable.
Lord Bacon wrote: In order to command nature one must first obey.
20
Forcing renewables onto people before they are ready continues to damage confidence in them. I’ve got nothing against renewable energy if it was reliable, affordable and practical and I’d say no reasonable person would. But events such as the Texas example will make it harder than ever in the future convince people to trust renewables when (and if ever?) they are ready.
Currently the ‘Green energy’ public relations policies remind me of the joke about the surgeon warning his patient of the approaching operation’s chances of success: “You should know that this operation is very risky. The chances of surviving it are only 1 in 10. However, cheer up because my last 9 patients died!”
10
And fossil fuels are long term storable, portable and commandable power. What is insane about the destruction of fossil fuel power on which society is built is that it is not being replaced. Except for nuclear which according to the Nuclear lobby, has no emissions. The language is being altered by the UN. Emissions now means deadly carbon dioxide, apparently. The most polluting industrial chemical ever.
So how are we going to make metals, concrete and build a new world without producing CO2? Still the Australian government has just written to every ASX listed company, demanding to know how they are going to do it. That sure saves lawyers trying to understand chemistry.
It will all be fine when we have Clean Energy, without producing any carbon dioxide. That however does exclude every living thing. Not just Bill Gates’ cows.
201
And the Green of chlorophyll is also a long chain hydrocarbon, like every other product of living cells. It needs to be banned, cancelled.
210
It’s hard to believe that all the trees, plants, animals, insects, fish are made from the gas Carbon Dioxide.
Even our Prime Minister Tony Abbott said air was weightless and who really believes those trillions of tons of coal and oil and gas and huge forests were once just blowing in the wind.
So the world against fossil fuels would have us believe what? That CO2 is a noxious emission and industrial byproduct and evil world killing pollution? It is why Texas, the very place where the US oil revolution started, is now frozen. Obviously they just need more windmills according to Amazon and Facebook and Twitter and Google and Bill Gates and their sock puppet Joe Biden.
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The way Texas drank the cool-aid we might as well call it California East. And Austin, Texas is becoming more and more like San Francisco each day.
I hate to see so many people in Texas suffer such prolonged freezing in their homes, loss of electricity, and loss of food and water–when it is all so senseless, predictable, and preventable.
If the population of Texas doesn’t make sustained condemnation of renewable energy, their leaders, and their politics and demand needed changes, this will happen again in winter and probably in hot summers too.
Texas has been a magnet for industries and companies moving from California and other states unfriendly to business. That trend should lessen after this winter. If not, then Texas may go from economic growth to a sustained recession.
70
IIRC my friends and relatives who live in Texas have reported rolling blackouts in the heat of summer in recent years. I was surprised to hear that. I was not aware that they had been drinking so deep of the CAGW kool-aid. 🙁
50
Touch of irony – in the 1980s it was fashionable for places to have a “sister city” and Adelaide and Austin became sisters because South Australia and Texas were both “founded” in 1836. In 1986 both celebrated their 150th birthdays and each capital city sent ambassadors (in sport, trade etc) to the other.
SA has survived one blackout disaster, but only by pretending that diesel electricity generation is green and clean!
70
Just imagine how much worse it could have been if they had lots more windmills.
10
“Except for nuclear which according to the Nuclear lobby, has no emissions”, yeah but look out when it does! Coal on the other hand has mainly benign emissions, mainly plant food.
81
Texas decided to be isolated from the other states so cannot import energy. Another brilliant move was not to mitigate against extreme weather events and blame subsequent problems on the small input of renewables and the non existent green new deal .
324
“Texas decided to be isolated from the other states so cannot import energy.”
The grids around Texas were also short on power so there was very little power available for Texas to import.
“…the small input of renewables…”
23% of the power grid is not a small input.
260
So given that Texas has one of the largest percentages of renewables in the world, are you actually admitting that globally renewables provide an even smaller input? So all the propaganda about renewables taking over is rubbish? Who’d have guessed?
140
Not as dire a shortage as in Texas, but academic anyway as they uniquely cut themselves off.
As most power comes from fossils and nuclear ( which all failed) why blame the renewables ?, very twisted logic there .
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“As most power comes from fossils and nuclear ( which all failed) why blame the renewables ?
In fact, Coal, Nuclear and Fossil fuels are the only reason Texas had any energy at all as renewables were pretty much non-existent. I have to agree, your logic is pretty twisted.
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Because they were the majority power generators they would be the last to go and many areas had nothing, logic ball back in your court
027
“Because they were the majority power generators they would be the last to go…”
That statement makes no sense, if renewables were more reliable than fossil fuels then they would have been the last to go but instead they were the first to go whereas even with their problems, Nuclear and fossil fuels continued supplying power but renewables remained gone.
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No, the fossils went too, hence the current situation where people have died because of no mitigation planning.
The logic ball never left your court.
017
“No, the fossils went too”
Some of them did, but unlike renewables, they were never gone.
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Harley is hopelessly lost, wrong on every assertion!
https://i.postimg.cc/tTc1tYnV/texas-GAS-saves-the-day.png
N.G. increased production throughout the crisis. ( Harley, look at the graphic!!) Also 14 other states had rolling brown outs during this crisis. Had they been connected, they could not have helped.
N.G. could not increase generation as much as hoped because they had to divert electrical generation gas to heating gas, because of winds failure, and because some NG plants had grid based compressors subject to blackouts necessary to prevent cascade failures due to wind failures! Also the wind failures on the 15th – 16th would have happened regardless of winterization! Why, well the wind production stopped due to no wind! Winterization wada small part of why NG could not fully increase production.
The main post is incorrect to lead one to think that NG had extensive cold failures, it did not!
Also this statement in Jo’s post is simply wrong; (sorry Jo)
“Ryan also makes the point that Texas doesn’t pay people to sit around with ready capacity. (They certainly got what they paid for).
ERCOT is an “energy only” system, which means producers are only compensated for power produced, while a capacity market provides compensation for readiness or spare capacity for power as well.”
Texas does not pay for for “ready capacity” yet the Texas citizens do! It is not wise to think that because government pays for something it is free. Look at the graphic, NG load follows wind solar every day, multiple times a day!! They have immense ready capacity and it is built into the cost of NG and that cost is far higher then necessary due to useless solar and wind!
This is why Mr T Boone Pickens not only built subsidized wind, but invested in NG as well. NG costs are artificially raised due to hapless solar and helpless wind.
This crisis was wind and solar failure caused, and NG prevented it from being ten times worse, and wind would have failed regardless if winterization on the most critical night due to no wind.
40
fossils and nuclear ( which all failed)
This allegation is being repeated but where is the evidence -give the data please. One nuclear reactor had to be shut down due to the cooling pumps failing. No evidence has yet been given of any gas or coal plant that was online going off line. Many gas plants ramped up and came online and gas powered electric more than doubled between 8 feb and 16 Feb. However due to the mothballing of fossils not enough gas and coal could be brought out of retirement to cover for the total failure of renewables and the escalating demand. Fossil fuels failed to rescue the renewable disaster because they had been so badly mothballed.
Of course the other Green failure is the installation of air-source heatpumps. They work ok down to @5c but below this they or just fans so they switch on electric bar heaters in the cold airflow coming from outside. With these installations prevalent in Texas as the cold dropped not only did all the renewable/unreliables drop out but demand accelerated exponentially due to the stupidity of air heat pumps.
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That was Harley’s way of saying he didn’t read the article on which he comments?
120
What little power was being generated sure didn’t come from any renewables.
10
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/weather/2021/02/18/oncor-ends-controlled-outages-thousands-of-north-texans-still-without-power-due-to-equipment-damage/
So it could have been a lot worse??
20
More from the GWPF on the true costs of Offshore wind farms. Here’s the conclusion and like all of the S&W idiocy this is a dirty, toxic disaster just waiting to happen and repeated every 20 years. And ZERO change to weather, climate or temp by 2100 or for 1,000 years. SEE Zickfeld study, The RS & NAS study, even the left wing Conversation etc.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2021/02/Offshore-Wind-LCOE.pdf?mc_cid=58041dcc09&mc_eid=dcbe0ef09b
8. “Conclusions All major political parties endorse the idea that the UK can be almost entirely electrified: heating, transport and industry will allegedly be switched away from fossil fuels, and any sector that cannot be handled the same way is supposed to switch to hydrogen, itself produced using electricity. The country’s future is therefore being wagered on the basis that offshore windfarms are going to produce cheap electricity in the very near future. This paper has confirmed the conclusions reached by Aldersey-Williams et al. and by Hughes that there is no hard evidence that any change in the cost structure of the industry is under way. It has also shown that the views of offshore wind advocates on the potential for cost reductions are incompatible with what windfarm developers themselves have said. Regardless, the government appears determined to proceed with its ‘net zero‘ project. The prospects for consumers and the UK economy therefore appear extremely dim”.
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Friday Funny: nature makes a mockery of month-ahead model forecasts.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/19/friday-funny-nature-makes-a-mockery-of-month-ahead-model-forecasts/
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Too funny! And they have super computers to predict Much Above Average for Texas and warmer in most places. And it is freezing everywhere else too. Snow in Athens.
. But we are told that arctic warming is the cause. So where’s the cold air coming from? Africa?
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I like the comment to “Friday Funny: nature makes a mockery of month-ahead model forecasts”
ResourceGuy
February 19, 2021 3:24 pm
I have to agree, it does seem like run-away Al Gore effect.
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The so called NZ dream of more renewables is starting to look like more of a nightmare.
As linked to before the cost would be a staggering 5 trillion $ and not change climate or temp by 2100 or way beyond. But it would bankrupt the country and leave it with a toxic disaster forever and plenty of power failures as well.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/18/claim-new-zealand-economy-will-have-to-restructure-around-a-limited-renewable-energy-supply/
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The Left destroys everything it touches. Looks like NZ will learn this lesson the hard way.
40
https://judithcurry.com/2021/02/18/assigning-blame-for-the-blackouts-in-texas/
10
https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-capacity-market/
00
They actually do. It is built into the cost of NG only occured due to the foolishness if wind and solar.
00
Texas water will have to stay off until every house is shut off.
If not, turning on the water will flood into the streets until each house pipes are fixed.
Truly a nightmare in the making.
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The media here was saying that there are not enough plumber’s in the world to fix this problem in Texas right now…
40
Ray Ryan, War Room Media claimed : “Most of the renewables in the country (especially in Texas) are backed up by short-cycle gas turbines, which are assets that can turn on in 2–3 hours.”
I assume that he means ‘Open Cycle Gas Turbine’ (OCGT) powered generators. He is quite wrong if that is so as the document in the link below states that OCGT can be up and synchronised in 3-5 minutes and providing full power 15-30 minutes later, cold start. Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) powered generator can be up and synchronised in 15 minutes and outputting full power 190-240 minutes later, cold start.
I think he should do a bit of research before making such statements.
John
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/387566/Technical_Assessment_of_the_Operation_of_Coal_and_Gas_Plant_PB_Power_FIN….pdf
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As I read that the points you make jumped out at me.
I remember wasting time one day searching on gas turbines, trying to learn a bit about them and GE’s biggest was still efficient down to 30% nameplate in CCGT mode. You need these purring along when you expect extreme weather if you are stupid enough to install a lot of wind.
70
OCGT is usually used for peaking, quick start up, and CCGT for base load or demand variation where the slower start time is not so important.
John
10
CCGT units consist of one (or more) gas turbine that can operate as an OCGT if required. The hot gas exhaust is fed into a boiler and that heat recovered boosts the operating efficiency (in the latest units) to 62+%.
That figure of 30% is a bit low, even for an OCGT but consider you are getting about half the output of electricity** for the same amount of electricity. That’s why SA’s ‘peaking plants’ are reluctant to startup when the price of electricity is below $A300.
There is a further problem than rapid on/off cycling causes heat stress cracking and lots of downtime for maintenance. Anybody getting 30% capacity factor from an OCGT is doing well. Trying to run a CCGT in cycling mode doesn’t help. Ireland tried to use wind turbines with CCGTs as a low emission process and abandoned it as too expensive and with too high emissions.
**and the same amount of CO2 emissions so OCGT units emit almost as much per MWh as a HELE black coal station.
20
Texas has loads of natural gas. What happened?
Before the US Clean Air Act, natural gas compressor stations were powered by natural gas fueled engines. The engines tapped a small amount of the flowing gas to run the compressors that delivered the gas to power plants, residences, and industrial users.
After the US Clean Air Act and the AGW circus, the pipeline compressors became electrically powered.
When the grid failed, the compressors went off line and the flow of gas to the power plants diminished or stopped.
Once again, someone did not think about this scenario. If they had, there might have been diesel generators to power the compressors or perhaps regulators might have excepted critical infrastructure from the AGW rules.
220
Isn’t it time we began to hold legislators financially responsible for the adverse outcomes of their idiocies?
120
Yet despite this they increased NG through out the crisis.
10
Looks like Texas will wake to a better day today [their time]
According to windy.com much of the state is around 10 deg C with some useful wind.
https://www.windy.com/-Temperature-temp?temp,30.039,-94.439,6,i:pressure
11
As I posted Yesterday, the way the Texas grid is set up means that they are making bucketloads out of this disaster, and that is by design – look at the spot prices, this is how capitalism is supposed to work.
Blame renewables all you want, that is the right wing answer to everything, or dig a bit. Follow the money.
233
That sounds quite plausible to me Peter. But not as an alibi for the renewables or the greenie thinking behind them. Some things are meant to be under private hands. Other things; not so much.
50
“..this is how capitalism is supposed to work.”
Except it isn’t capitalism, the governments (State and Federal) has so distorted the market with subsidies and regulation that it is impossible for the market to to work properly. Remove those subsides and regulations and no one would build renewables, just ask Warren Buffet: “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”
331
Indeed, under true free enterprise the wind and solar would never have been built, period, end of story. It is sad but necessary to see the high costs now, as the pain is a necessary prod to sanity.
Sadly the misguided left ( I can be so polite) will blame such things on capitalism, and say the only energy producer that increased production throughout the crisis ( NG) was to blame.
20
I heard that AOC is travelling to Texas right now to observe the recovery and to help out wherever she can.
Brings a tear to my eye..sniff..she’s a true patriot and humanitarian..sniff..
10
Totally agree; “follow the money”
Right bak to Chyna.
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Didn’t risk posting one of your undigested links eh.
50
I wish he would make some sense. Incomprehensible.
10
You posted yesterday, ad museum, that everyone was confused about name plate capacity. I’ll make it simpler for you.
My car is described as 100 kw. It’s not meant to be reved at 5000 rpm, where all the power is, all the time. It’s there for when needed. The way I drive, it’s a 30kw car on average. If I get to choose, its a 100 kw car. If its not up to me when the power comes on, is it a 30 kWh car or unroadworthy?
20
If you bought a 100kw car that will only deliver 30 kw you got the “double overhead dipsticks, shaved radiator cap and straight through glove box model”
As did those who believe renewable nameplate values
20
It delivers 90kw at the wheels, when I overtake on the highway. Otherwise, I’m shifting up a gear at 3000 rpm so rarely pumping out more than 50kw of power (torque is abyssmal at low revs). Usually coasting on 2000 rpm so about 5-7kw being used. That doesn’t make it a 30kw engine is the point.
00
O come, all ye gullible,
Wailing and despondent
O come ye, O come ye to complain.
Come and behold them,
the mess of turbines;
O come, let us adore them,
O come, let us adore them,
O come, let us adore them,
and beg for more.
O Sing, chorus of believers,
Sing in exultation,
Sing all that believe the ABC’s holy words.
Give to wind glory in the highest;
O come, let us adore them,
O come, let us adore them,
O come, let us adore them,
and beg for more.
And sceptics we greet with denial
for evermore we will their name scorn.
Word of failures, now appearing,
will be, like reality, denied.
O come, let us adore them,
O come, let us adore them,
O come, let us adore them,
and beg for more.
20
Resembles hospitals that very often have back-up diesel generators for electricity when the mains supply fails for any reason. They are an expensive item that sit unused for 99% of the time, but have high value in the other 1% of time (or whatever the real % is). It is a matter of the value of human lives and the cost of risk reduction.
Seems to me that Planning Engineer is saying that Texas had nobody responsible for including that back-up function for saving lives in a rare unusual circumstance. That would be unforgiveable in hospital design, but in this Texas event we are mostly getting blame shifting and concealment of who made this deadly mistake.
But, it is a very complex and diverse scenario as to, for example, why nuclear had reactor cooling problems in a very cold weather snap.
Personally, I have been bleating since 1990 about the dangers of crippling the work of experienced engineers and scientists in a lemming rush to enforce a carbon free future, whatever that gobbledygook means, on a mostly unwilling voting population.
Belief is the enemy of empirical science. Geoff S
180
Weather Channel, Jan 21, 2021 – using predictions from the experts at NOAA. Most of Texas is in the “Much above average” temperatures region.
Three weeks later
Regular commenter, Fitzy, gave a prediction a week ago that this Autumn will be unusual,along with a really silly explanation of why but no details on exactly what will be unusual. NOAA with its massive computing power can’t foresee record cold instead of much above average temperatures. Yet Fitzy has no qualms about giving you his 10 cents worth based on a hand-waving explanation, which didn’t make sense, with full confidence. It probably even came across as technically sound but the proof in the pudding is always quantifying your postulate and testing the hypothesis.
80
This is what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket and trip on a tree root on your way back from the chook pen, you have a mouldy turnip for breakfast for a week!
Just thought the situation demanded a medieval reference to ‘acclimitise’ readers with the brave new zero emissions world their non gender specific offspring will inherit!
By the way, ‘winterizing’ is not, never has been and never will be a word, if we aren’t blase about the well educated illiterates crashing through our language we can correct them with the perfectly articulate words and phrases which are already in the dictionary.
81
“By the way, ‘winterizing’ is not, never has been and never will be a word…”
The Mirriam Webster Dictionary thinks it is:
50
That’s me agreeing with both of you.
10
8 benefits of Skull & Bones covertly dominating USA https://aumladder.blogspot.com/2021/02/8-benefits-of-skull-bones-covertly-dominating-usa.html
00
Okay then, now think about this, after what has happened during the last four days or so.
Contrary to what some have said, even here, wind turbines do not do well in cold weather, as they found out in Minnesota ten years or so back now, something which has gotten lost now in the mists of time.
Lubricating oil.
These wind towers when stopped for extended periods of time, and mind you, here I am just talking of hours, need to be turned over so that the major shaft bearings do not brinell, because if that does happen, then the bearings have to be checked and replaced, easier just to replace them really. To make certain this does not happen, the shaft needs to be rotated, hence the blades rotate, giving the impression that the turbine is generating power. Hence when you look at wind graphs (at Aneroid etc) you occasionally see a wind plant delivering negative power, eg, drawing power from the grid, this is what is happening when they are all stopped and the whole plant is back at zero. Now, I have said that a wind plant NEVER delivers its Nameplate, in fact never really even all that close to it. When individual towers shut down at a wind plant site, they draw some of their own generated power from the other working turbines at that plant to turn over those stopped plants every so often.
Okay, Minnesota and the cold ten years back. The lubricating oil froze hence no lubrication, hence no turning, hence bearings r00ted. So, all the turbines had to be individually checked, and most replaced. They (sort of) fixed this by adding the drawing of grid power to keep that oil at the operating temperature. Then there was also the problem of the icing of the blades, leading to imbalances in the blades, and the resultant loss of some blades. so deicing came in and surface compounds to (sort of) repel the ice from the blades. (Yeah right!)
Okay then, background scene painted.
Now we have Texas, and all their towers have been now stopped cold for many days.
Let’s look at a large scale 500MW() coal fired unit first then, shall we. Maintenance. Ground level. ONE unit. Shut it down, go in, do the service and the checks, walk out, start up.
Same Nameplate now of 500MW only wind turbines, so (average 2.5MW) we now have 200 turbines, so two maybe three large wind plants spread across large areas, (two to three of them)
Working at height, working inside the nacelle, so working in a confined space. Probable hire of a helicopter to lower them onto the platform, rather than climbing the equivalent 40 stories up a vertical ladder, carrying all the gear in a backpack plus. Two to three hours each nacelle, now multiplied by 200 times. for each nacelle. Plus parts plus labour.
The cost will be horrendous.
And, no power output until they are all completed.
But hey, wind power is cheaper than fossil fuelled power, eh!
Tony.
360
“The cost will be horrendous”
I found an article that says if they have to replace the shaft bearing it can cost wind-farm operators up to $450,000, so if you had 200 bearings to replace that would be up to $90,000,000…not a cheap fix.
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/wind-power/designing-reliable-cost-effective-wind-turbine-shaft-systems/
180
I found another article that says a wind turbine costs between $2.6 million and $4 million so using the smaller figure that $90 million in repair costs would be roughly equivalent to buying 34 new wind turbines.
https://weatherguardwind.com/how-much-does-wind-turbine-cost-worth-it/
60
Ric
So would the bearings have been che3cked on any that are now running?
40
Killer arithmetic; highly bookmarkable.
20
Tony, for our US listeners you may want to explain what rOOted means. 🙂
30
I was not familiar with the term so I went with this definition:
https://outbackdictionary.com/root/
30
“eats roots and leaves”.
I understood that describes a promiscuous horticulturist.
joke
20
Dennis we know it to mean can’t be fixed with duct tape , WD 40 or hammer.
30
If someone calls you a wombat you have a bad reputation.
10
Antidote for “figjam”?
10
Bandicoot?
10
rooted means working all politicians up higher:
(US) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/investor-who-donated-nearly-dollar1m-to-trump-inauguration-sentenced-to-12-years-in-prison/ar-BB1dO9QY?li=BBnb7Kz
00
Tony – why do they work in siberia, antarctica, etc
Here is a link to current outages https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas
and this is a link to Ercot http://www.ercot.com/
Wind is working ATM
113
Not sure how many times it needs to be spelled out but let’s try another way , why won’t your car work in Antarctica but ok in Port Macquarie?
50
Fitz, you ask :Why do they (wind turbines) work in Antarctica?
A quote you can find today Fitz, from the Australian Governments website….
“In 2003, two 30 m tall, 300 kW wind turbines were installed at Mawson and the system was capable of providing 600 kW of renewable power which was used for both powering and heating the station
In 2017, one of the turbines suffered a critical failure and is no longer operational. Today, the one remaining turbine continues to produce power for Mawson station.”
Ok Fitz,
One of your 10 storey high, so called renewables, is now just a 2000 tonne, useless piece of toxic junk, standing in the pristine wilderness.
Well done green power.
110
Peter the wind power works in Antarctica, and the solar power works for portable electric fences in Northern NSW … both for the same reason. Because they are NOT ON THE GRID. These are fantastic power sources but they do not belong on the grid. Its about that simple. Wind power in Antarctica is a very good thing, but you can best believe that the energy will be fed into a battery before they use it at the base. Solar panels for electric fences will always be stolen if you have them too close to the road. Which is an empirical measure of just how good they are. But they don’t belong as part of the grid.
110
firmly latched to the delusion of false equivalence
20
I read in a US publication that the gas wells in cold areas such as Canada use their own gas to keep the well heads from freezing up – makes sense. But in Texas the gas well heating systems are electric, ….so no power, no heat and the wells are useless.
110
Seems they have steam trucks for intermittent problems with freezing
00
Let’s face facts. Renewables are not only economically destructive, they kill people.
131
It was green running dog politicians mandating retrofitting of electric heating to gas lines did the core mischief; it should be these policy brokers who pick up the damages bills.
80
There’s plenty of blame to go round. May be easier to find something someone did right.
This fiasco will be a case study in engineering text books for the next 100 years.
40
The weather forecasters displaced the decimal point in the SSP values they used for the February forecast. So forecasts ran way too hot; meaning Texans were not warned of the impending cold.
Shows how important it is to get the SSPs correct.
If you have not been following the latest in weather forecasting then this link might help to come to grips with SSPs:
https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/events/6.Riahi_SSP_ArcticWS_May2014.pdf
Its such a woke world we live in. Please share my pathway!
61
It’s a little beyond my comprehension that funded groups pursue this manifest nonsense.
10
So far, 47 people have died from cold in Texas and surrounding states due to unreliable “renewable” energy.
It’s odd how these deaths barely rate a mention but the slightest nuclear power incident, no matter how harmless or trivial, results in near riots calling for the closure of nuclear energy, even more so than other cheap, reliable sources such as coal and gas.
Even Leftist NBC admits to the cold-related deaths:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-counts-its-losses-begins-mourn-those-who-died-cold-n1258365
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The simple explanation is IGNORANCE.
Analysis of the CO2 infrared absorption spectrum shows that it has not, does not and cannot cause global warming. That claim is contrary to the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Furthermore, analysis of the weekly CO2 concentration data from the Mauna Loa Observatory shows that it is climate that determines the rate of generation of CO2. Even the drop in temperature due to the monthly passage of the New Moon between the Sun and the Earth shows up in the data as a change in the rate of generation of CO2.
But why worry about the truth when we can all feel good making in futile attempt to solve an imaginary problem to “Save the World”.
221
Bevan,
a question. I’ve seen a figure for the down dwelling back radiation (the essential part of climatology) is only equivalent to minus 80℃, although my (very rough) calculation says minus 20-25℃. What you suggest where I’ve gone wrong?
00
” …futile attempt to solve an imaginary problem to “Save the World”. ”
…futile attempt to solve an imaginary problem to “Control the World”. There fixed it for you.
20
Bevan, correct with the absorption spectrum. Also 2nd law of Thermodynamics (heat only flows from hot to cold). Further point not considered by all climate alarmists (including those that call themselves scientists) is that the earth is a open system not closed. Space exists at the outer edge of the atmosphere and the average temperature is about 1K (note not 4K). The Earth radiates to space and a satellite measured radiation window is 66W/m2 not 40W/m2 as in cartoons of heat flow at the Earth surface. There is no back radiation.
30
I was reading a thread on Twitter last night from an ERGOT employee that indicated that frozen water effected the ability of the suppliers to make steam to drive turbines. So, any conventional power source had a difficult and unexpected time, whereas the turbines, once they had shed ice on their blades were up and running.
Frozen water burst many household pipes as well, big repair job ahead.
ERCOT were caught not planning for an event like this, sounds like a touch of Texan hubris, wonder if this event will change their minds ?
33
Only if they can be convinced that a meandering jet stream is a sign of global cooling, fat chance.
10
Why not el gordo?
The atmosphere is a chaotic system driven by energy imbalances, add more anergy the bigger the imbalance
This is implicit in the physics of climate and weather
112
You are sprouting the AGW mantra of more energy in the system will overwhelm natural variability, this has been falsified.
The meandering jet stream comes about when the sun is quiet, which shrinks the stratosphere and leads to cold air outbreaks. So what you need to do is prove me wrong.
This new hiatus will continue for at least five more years, further evidence that CO2 doesn’t cause warming.
40
“The atmosphere is a chaotic system driven by energy imbalances, add more anergy the bigger the imbalance
This is implicit in the physics of climate and weather”
The weather is a chaotic system driven by electrical difference between the ionosphere and the deep earth and the shenanigans that goes into the efforts that come about, to make those differences less. Sorry for humanising natural forces. Hunter Thompson said that electricity is homesick and lazy. I follow that way of thinking.
So you make an excellent point Peter Fitzroy. But put yourself in our shoes? When it heats up its global warming (hydrocarbon output). When it cools down its climate change. When it stays right about the same of course its global warming because the solar power has dropped off so global warming has to be press-ganged in to explain the relative stasis.
This was the problem Popper had with Freud. The fellow goes and jumps in the lake and the Freudian comes in with his explanation. But of course if he doesn’t jump in the lake still the Freudian explanation holds. Popper thought that Einstein did a better job of it (not true) but still the point is well-made.
Yes its true that if the climate change happens, and this is to do with space weather…….. and then the jet streams wriggle all out of whack, then this can deliver Arctic air to Texas and I can see that. So if that was the one comment you ever made I’d have to pat you on the back for it.
But CO2 is as inert a gas as could be imagined with regards to electrical energy. This is not the cause. And we would be happier if the left occasionally threw the dog a bone. Like with Michael Moore pretty recently? That was very good work by Michael and his people.
30
AGW forecast for this US winter, so wrong it isn’t funny.
https://notrickszone.com/2021/02/19/junk-grade-models-even-short-term-climate-and-weather-modelers-get-it-all-wrong/
00
This weather was forecast as the jetstream meanders.
Posted in Jan this year, “On the sudden stratospheric warming and polar vortex of early 2021”
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/sudden-stratospheric-warming-and-polar-vortex-early-2021
From 2015, “Evidence linking rapid Arctic warming to mid-latitude weather patterns”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4455715/
You were warned.
11
10+ years of electricity costs in 5 days.
Yes. Let’s have more governmental regulations.
https://conservativeus.com/heres-why-texans-are-seeing-electric-bills-as-high-as-17k-after-the-winter-storm/
Bankruptcy by Utility Company games, eh?
80
“Texas paid for unreliable energy, not for spare capacity
Ryan also makes the point that Texas doesn’t pay people to sit around with ready capacity. (They certainly got what they paid for).”
Boy is that ever a sound point. Here we see how the real world can differ from scrupulously logical free enterprise models. So supposing you have the railways in 19th century America. These are built on fractional reserve interest bearing debt. But competition does what it ought to do. So far so good as far as the free market models are concerned. The price of rail cargo transport starts falling towards marginal costs. Which makes paying the debt back untenable. Now both the railways people and the financiers must infiltrate politics and start ruining free enterprise norms, in order to justify their investments. Its a shame we no longer use the phrase “political economy”
Perhaps the best way to run these coal generation plants, to get the kind of excess capacity you need in wartime and for natural disasters, would be to have a communist superstructure. You would have very high royalties for coal on the negative side. But no taxes on retained earnings, and zero interest loans for investment in production capacity. Plus you’d make sure that you subcontracted out to middling business, perhaps going so far as to only work with fairly rich people who were sole traders. Fairly close to the De-Witt Clinton model for infrastructure. This would probably lead to a more faithful representation of the Misean capitalist models, despite it being a communist undertaking. Because all these guys would tend to overshoot into surplus capacity. Yet without having political power. Without having interest bearing debt. Yet probably the public purse would get more revenues coming in via quite harsh royalties.
In the end sustained wealth creation cannot come through debt. It has to come through retained earnings. The debt based models have short legs.
20
1984 wasn’t an instruction manual, but it is now.
80
Oh Well. This is the new normal, the coming future. We are all going to do this soon.
Learn the lessons we see before us. You need a backup generator at your house and plenty of diesel / petrol fuel storage, because your grid will be no longer reliable when you really want it.
I have about 10 years of wood for heating in summer. For cooling in summer we have just installed a plunge pool. Last thing is a generator which I will buy in about 5 years time when i expect this stuff to start in NSW, thereabouts.
50
for heating in winter it should say of course.
30
Aloha! We have a farm in Hawaii but due to ccp-19 stayed here in Texas. We live north of Houston. One thing I noticed driving around in the past couple weeks of cold I never saw a single EV car! I usually see Teslas and Audis and all sort of other EVs driving on roads here on normal weather days.
I am curious to know if they even work in sub-freezing temps. I had seen reports years ago that for Teslas the car entry did not work in a freeze. Anyone know much about that? I never hear from Tesla owners or other EVs during this cold outage.
I do not own any EVs. I have plenty of gasoline tanks so I do not need a gas station. I can store gasoline. How does that work with EVs? I understand utilities give you the option of 120v or 240v for charging at home but when electric outages last from 20-50 hours what happens to a frozen EV with a frozen lithium battery? What other freeze problems happen with EVs?
120
I’d guess that you might find some experiences on the grapevine before too long.
I’d expect the ysm not so much
31
Sorry AI; miss hit yet again! I seem to be having a bad run of these; trying to read and type while doing eye drops 🙁 (ie, one-eyed reading!).
10
From Salon, on what caused the Texas power failure:
In a media blitz, Republican leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, tried to pass blame to perceived liberal enemies with baseless claims about the longtime oil- and gas-producing state’s dependence on renewables like solar and wind. Those source indeed comprise an increasingly large share of the state’s energy blend — a change largely driven by the market conservatives claim to love — but had little to do with the collapse, which primarily concerned the natural gas sector. Those lies also obscured a broader truth, which is that the renewables that failed did so for the same reasons that fossil fuels failed: The wishful thinking that Texas winters will always be mild, and therefore cheap.
[…]
In the old system, local plants generated power for local use. But in the open market, retailers purchased electricity at wholesale from generators anywhere in the state, putting a new strain on the state’s power grid. Deregulation also led to a less uniform and predictable consumer base, Caperton said, which is more difficult to serve, and in recent years the state’s production capacity has not kept up with demand. Texas can largely fend off blackouts in the summer because producers are at the ready to take advantage of the high rates that accompany scorching seasonal heat, but that base demand disappears in the winter, and many operators take their generators offline.
16
“In the old system, local plants generated power for local use.” That has to be the way forward. If not a small sabotage team can bring the grid down. With coal you need a level of economies of scale so you can scrub the exhaust of particulates and particularly Mercury. So there is that side of it. But when I see those big power lines going across the country I think of fragility. Since World War II when Americans and Australians have gone elsewhere to fight, they have completely underestimated the need for a stable grid under extreme situations. I don’t think this auction or trading business is viable. We wouldn’t want to rule out the idea of intentional sabotage in the future, or even in this case. These trading systems seem to be more about the science of rent-seeking than the science of running the grid.
10
After reading the following order I shook my head in amazement at how the supposedly greatest nation in the world could end up in such a disgraceful situation leading to the deaths of their own citizens.
Department of Energy Blocked Texas From Increasing Power Output Before And During Deadly Storm
71
I think that the only Australian State that could possibly run on 100% renewables is Tasmania (hydro + wind + a bit of solar). As for the rest of Oz, plus nearly all of the rest of the world, the ‘renewable solution’ is a big fat joke. Morons like Zali Steggal have no idea of the real world, which is: Unless everyone wants to go back to a pre-industrial (ie; middle ages) lifestyle, then energy generation must be a logical mix of renewables/non-renewables (ensuring that the fossil fuel component is less important as time goes by).
20
Just hydro. The wind and solar are window dressing.
But remember that BassLink was actually deployed to protect Tasmania from electricity shortages in low rainfall years by allowing imports of reliable Victorian electricity sourced from the Latrobe Valley brown coal plants, so that some water could be saved for peak periods. Tasmania selling hydro generated electricity back to Victoria was a way to help pay for the cost of BassLink and its maintenance.
10
Yes, the President elect
TrumpBiden formerly rejoins the Paris Agreement as deep freeze continues in Texas.40
Well, he has mentioned the new green deal and build back better, World Economic Forum (NGO): The Great Reset.
40
I think you might mean “formally …”
Do you appreciate the different between climate change and a weather event?
“the President elect
TrumpBiden” … what is the point of this? Trump lost the election – he is a sore loser who has duped many people into believing the election was fraudulent … that’s how it looks to us objective observers.15
“Do you appreciate the different between climate change and a weather event?”
Do you? Your people can’t even differentiate between “climate change” and “industrial CO2 release”
Clean up your language and maybe you can dig your way out of your analytical handicaps. Because the excitement has been growing around here. Now that you have arrived. We are seeing that there could be a new messiah in our midsts. You see YOU might be the fellow we have been waiting for since the early new century. That one person who could come along and show us evidence for more than the most trivial global CO2 warming.
I thought for a short period of time that I was that new messiah. Because I hadn’t been looking at the satellite data for maybe five years. Then I looked at it again, and in a time period of weak solar activity (judged by sunspot count) there had been anomalous warning. So seeing myself as the person that you clearly are, I tried to alert everyone I knew to this first ever signal of CO2-induced global warming. Only to find out days later, that I wasn’t the messiah and that the satellite data had been tweaked.
But now you are here, I’ll position myself as John-The-Baptist and you do your best to be the Saviour of global warming theory.
I’ll just run out for some popcorn now and I’m hoping that by the time I come back that you have the evidence. The evidence for more than trivial CO2-induced warming on a planetary scale.
20
As you have just walked into class and don’t know the lay of the land, Tilba is on our side. I recognise your voice from around the traps, where do you normally hang out?
21
“Tilba Is On Our Side”
I was born on a Thursday. But it wasn’t last Thursday.
00
“Do you appreciate the different between climate change and a weather event?”
Do you mean “difference”
Do you? Contrary to all the global warming climate change hoopla that blames man-made carbon dioxide, also called CO2, as a climate villain, the scientific fact is that CO2 is NOT affecting the global climate, regardless of its concentration in the atmosphere. It never has affected the climate, and never will. Anthropogenic global warming is simply not possible. Why do you think Jo Nova is so passionate about this? The Nobel Peace Prize Community, the Scientific Community are in this together too.
20
I once read a political novel titled, “The Fools in Town Are on Our Side.” I forget the plot but it might have been about how to stay in office forever.
10
Hunter is rushing to Texas to check out all the crack pipes he keeps hearing about.
10
Jo, that sudden drop of about 12,000 MW looks like a cascade, which happens in seconds. All generators have automatic shut offs and if the grid destabilizes many will shut down. This is what happened in the great Western blackout in the mid 90’s. If so then NERC will find it because there are second by second records on each generator. What caused it is then the question. My guess is the wind turbines, but not the frozen ones.
50
Let me get this right; Texas is a strongly Republican State, yet they have surrendered their power grid to the duck squeezers, who have destroyed it.
This is what happens when conservatives “negotiate” and “compromise” with Greens.
The only way to deal with Greens and their useful idiots is to confront them, head on, and slap them back into the wilderness they came from.
60
an intellectual wilderness maybe, the Greens generally inhabit the inner city self righteousness belt and are thin on the ground out in the actual green world. Sadly that is changing as the Green contagion spreads now people are starting to move out of the city.
10
Pity, It originated as a post on a chat site. Are posts here copyright?
But it’s your site, I’m just a guest.
00
It has probably already been pointed out that the gas powered systems went off line when there was not enough electricity to run the gas pumps. The clever among us recognize this as a positive feedback – the worse it gets, the worse it gets. It’s going to happen again, too.
Coincidentally, arctic temperatures spiked up just before the temperatures crashed in Texas. Sometimes I think I’m the only one that notices. The good news is that extra heat going into the arctic is radiated to the vast dark void of interstellar space and which is how, because we know that excess heat was not created in the arctic, Earth sheds a fever.
10
You didn’t notice all the articles about warm air entering the arctic region causing the polar vortex to split and push cold air down into North America and Europe.
10
According to faceache fact checkers the problems Texas has / had with their electricity has nothing to do with renewables so now we all know that’s exactly what caused it !
30
Facebook fact-‘check’ as in ‘check’-mate …meaning ‘stoppage or restraint?’
Yep.
20
I attempted to share this on Facebook: https://joannenova.com.au/wp-content/18-feb-texas.gif
It said “This post can’t be shared – In response to Australian government legislation, Facebook restricts the posting of news links and all posts from news Pages in Australia. Globally, the posting and sharing of news links from Australian publications is restricted.”
So I tried downloading the picture, and Facebook still wouldn’t allow me to post it.
So I took a picture of part of the picture, containing the message, and posted that, together with the comment: “There are people in Houston celebrating a pointless Mars shot, while nearby, people die of cold”.
20
Much has been made of the $9,000 price peak. Its less than the A$14,000 price peaks seen in the Oz grid over a hot summer or during anomalies (75c forex rate used). I guess the difference is that in the US system those price peaks feed straight through to residential customers rather than Oz where you continue to pay your contract rate. The buffer between wholesale swings and retail price is one of the factors that make the base cost high in Oz compared to the US when its business as usual. Pay now gradually or pay later all at once.
20